Curiouser and Curiouser: Montgomery McFate’s Strange Interpretation of the Relationship between Anthropology and Counterinsurgency
(Massey University, New Zealand)
In 2005, in an article titled “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,” Dr. Montgomery McFate launched a serious academic assault on the anthropological tradition, established in the late 1960s in response to the involvement of social scientists in the Vietnam War and Project Camelot, of non-involvement in mission-related military and counterinsurgency research. Dr. McFate was then instrumental in the establishment of the Human Terrain System in 2006, which has ‘embedded’ social scientists with front-line army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has caused great concern among anthropologists and renewed interest in the professional ethics of the discipline, including the current proposed revisions of the AAA code of ethics which seek to re-introduce some of the original concerns of the code with issues such as covert research and the dissemination of research findings, which were specifically included as a reaction to counterinsurgency research but which were subsequently removed in the 1980s in response to concerns raised by private-sector anthropologists. In this paper, I critically review McFate’s accounting of the relationship between anthropology and counterinsurgency, and argue that it is her particular reading of history of that relationship that is curious and strange. Viewed in its proper historical context, the antipathetic relationship that had evolved was appropriate, ethical, and in no sense ‘curious’ or ‘strange.’ This paper critiques McFate’s article as a fundamentally flawed revisionist history intended to legitimate and facilitate the active involvement of anthropologists with the US military in the ‘war on terrorism’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.